Wahl Lab at Salk Institute is packed with scientific minds trained in genetics and biology, just the thing for pushing the boundaries of cancer research. But, despite all that brainpower, Dr. Geoffrey Wahl, the lab’s principal investigator, said something was missing.

Cancer researchers seldom meet what they’re trying to conquer. Most often, they see cancer by peering through a microscope or looking at reams of data.

What the lab needed was someone who had personally wrestled with the Big C.

“I thought this could be really beneficial for the people in the lab to get to know a person who had survived a cancer they were working on,” Wahl said.

An opportunity appeared at a water cooler during a 2011 cancer conference in Florida. There Wahl met a tall breast cancer survivor named Bianca Kennedy. Diagnosed in 2001 at age 35, Kennedy lives in San Diego.

So Wahl invited the freelance photographer over for a lab tour.

Soon she was attending weekly lab meetings and social occasions, sometimes going out to dinner with Wahl and his wife, Barbara Parker, a respected local oncologist and deputy director at Moores Cancer Center. Wahl said it wasn’t so much that this regular interaction spurred new scientific breakthroughs. But it did provide a direct connection to someone in the outside world who appreciates, and really needs, their work.

Basic research delivers years of regular doses of disappointment before success, Wahl said.

“The chances are, every day, your experiment is not going to work. You’re not going to get data. You’re not going to succeed. You have to have motivation to keep going on, and I think someone like Bianca can help provide that,” Wahl said.

About a year into this relationship, in August 2012, everything changed. Kennedy’s breast cancer came back. Suddenly, researchers were talking to a cancer patient rather than a cancer survivor.

That time to build a relationship, Wahl said, made all the difference in noticing clues that could, some day, lead to a deeper understanding of why cancer recurs.

“If Bianca hadn’t had a recurrence, I probably wouldn’t have pursued this as vigorously as I have,” Wahl said.

Kennedy, 48, said she too has gained perspective into what it takes to make progress in the fight against cancer.

Attending weekly lab meetings and other events at the austere blufftop research campus founded by luminary Jonas Salk, she said, has shown her true tenacity.

“People have no idea how hard they work. They work around the clock, and they’re not going to stop until the beast is tamed,” she said.

When the cancer came back, Parker volunteered to help conduct a second round of treatment at Moores Cancer Center. This special care, and the support of those in the lab, has meant a lot.

“Sometimes I have had to literally pinch myself,” Kennedy said.

As she underwent a new round of radiation treatment and hormone therapy, Kennedy said she made sure to visit the lab as much as she could.

Once, lab members recall, she arrived at a meeting with a purple mask-like pattern on her face, the mark of a steroid treatment that is part of the cancer fight. Another time she lifted her shirt to show the damage done by radiation.